The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is capping off this week with a meeting in Havana, just northwest of Tallahassee, where it will render a final vote on reinstating a black bear hunt in December.
The harvest would be the state’s first bear hunt in a decade.
But is it the only solution to managing the bear population of some 4,000 Florida black bears?
"I think that there's a lot of very important information being left out of that conversation," said Carlton Ward Jr., a prominent conservation photographer who has worked with National Geographic, the Smithsonian and founded the Florida Wildlife Corridor campaign in 2010.
Ward expressed concern that the conversation around the hunt is drawing attention away from helping the species have the ability to migrate to less populated key areas, such as the Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge and other spots in the panhandle and South Florida.
Some background: Ward Jr.'s work with the project helped protect a network of connected lands and waterways traversed by bears, bobcats and other Florida wildlife. A book and an award-winning documentary captured the stunning images and expeditions of Ward and his team.
He's an eighth-generation Floridian and spoke out against the last bear hunt in 2015.
More recently, Ward founded the storytelling and exploration company Wildpath.
In a phone conversation with the Daily Commercial, the famed photographer prefaces that he isn't against the sport of hunting or when needed for wildlife management, such as reining in the white-tailed deer overpopulation in the Northeast, which has caused road collisions with many fatalities.
But Ward disagrees with the hunt as a way to manage Florida's black bear population.
"There are three populations of bears with anywhere from 30 to 200 bears: Eglin Air Force Base, Glades and Highlands counties, and Chassahowitzka, the smallest, where there are only 30 bears. You know, those bears are by no means secure."
He says that bears are flush in the Ocala and Apalachicola National Forest and Big Cypress, where about 1,000 or so thrive, but they remain relatively endangered in other places.
The goal for optimal bear management, he added, would be to have the areas all connected as one contiguous population genetically.
"The way that's gonna happen is having enough bears in a place like Ocala or Apalachicola, that they push out and expand their range to reconnect with more orphaned populations like in Chassahowitzka or to repopulate areas that used to have bears.
"Florida's bear population actually needs to grow geographically to be viable for the long term," Ward emphasized.
"You have increased numbers of bears trying to eke out a living in an area that's just not suitable for them to be, you have increased numbers of bears getting killed on the highway and increased numbers of bears getting killed by management actions because they won't leave the neighborhoods and get away from garbage that's accessible to them. So, managing all wildlife such that it flourishes where it needs to be, should be, and is the goal of state management authorities."
This month, National Geographic released a new documentary produced by Ward and his Wildpath team called "Florida Bear Tracks." The documentary takes us into the woods with an all-female team of FWC biologists who are tagging and studying bears to see how they're affected by urban development, habitat loss and population growth.
Directed by K.T. Bryden, the doc follows the FWC researchers as they study black bears in South Florida.
Will their work be interrupted by the bear hunt once approved? Would a hunter shoot a tagged bear?
Ward said he thinks it's highly unlikely but doesn't rule it out in rare instances.
What did Ward encounter during the 2015 hunt?
"I was at a check station in the Ocala National Forest, on the east side. There were 22 bears killed that were brought through that check station the day I was there. One observation: The hunters were respectful sportsmen and sportswomen. There was a man I met who grew up bear hunting in Pennsylvania with his father, and he harvested two bears, and he was gonna skin them and make candles out of the wax from the fat and eat the meat. ... I respected all the hunters I met and appreciated them.
"But I also took note that not a single one of these bears was a nuisance bear. You know, these were bears being hunted in the wild. And the suggestion that killing these bears is going to resolve the conflict in the neighborhoods surrounding the forest is a loose association at best, because you know, what's gonna reduce that conflict is people securing their garbage and securing their pet food and being smart."
Bears played a starring role in why Ward decided to campaign for the Florida Wildlife Corridor.
"I have an advanced degree in ecology, and I didn't know we had bears living on cattle ranches in the Everglades headquarters region of Central Florida," said the Florida native, who was regularly exposed to the ranching lifestyle through his family's ranch land in Hardee County."These bears became like an emblem to me of these underappreciated last wild places we had. And the science of those bears kind of opened my mind to the science of the Florida Ecological Greenways network."
A 2006 project Ward was working on after working for the Smithsonian in Africa, while photographing for what became his book Florida Cowboys: Keepers of the Last Frontier, revealed GPS data from bears was showing that they were utilizing the orange groves and the cattle ranches and the state parks and the national parks.
"You know, it was all one connected home range for a wide-ranging black bear. And so understanding that I learned about the science of the Ecological Greenways network from the University of Florida from Tom Hocker. And that's when I proposed the Florida Wildlife Corridor as a campaign to tell this story, to show the state, to show the world that we still had a connected landscape in Florida that we could still protect. The bear was the inspiration and the motivation for that."
Maria Davidson, a large carnivore biologist and program manager for Safari Club International Foundation, said that problems with the last bear hunt in Florida informed the procedures of this year's proposed harvest.
"This hunt directly addressed some of the criticisms of the last hunt, meaning there is a finite number of tags," she explained. "It is a set number that will not change. So, there will be that number of tags issued, and that is the maximum number of bears that will be harvested. That's not to say that everybody will be successful in their hunt, but they know for a fact it won't be more than that."
What do proponents of the bear hunt say?
Supporters of the hunt argue it is a necessary population control measure and a valuable tool for wildlife management.
The Daily Commercial doesn't run opinion-editorial columns, but you can get perspectives on both sides, for and against the bear hunt, from our sister papers, the Fort Myers News-Press and Tallahassee Democrat
"Science and experience tell us it’s sometimes best to solve looming problems before they become a greater challenge down the road," George Warthen, chief conservation officer for the FWC, told the News-Press.
Warthen added that wildlife managers need to keep an eye on the future, citing that bears have expanded their occupied range from 17 to 51 percent of the state since 1992.
He says we might not have a problem now, but we will most likely have one in the future. The number of bears that could be harvested would be set conservatively each year and would equal the number of permits that could be issued through a random drawing, ensuring the harvest objective is not exceeded.
"Bears and, and frankly all wildlife live in a modern world where their numbers really need to be managed," Davidson said, "and it's an interesting social experiment. For the most part, the vast majority of people really understand that and agree with it with most species.
"But when it comes to bears for some reason or another, there is this emotional response where they just don't want it to happen. So you have this very, um, emotional anti-hunting for any reason. But the downside to that is that bare numbers grow beyond what is sustainable."
Will opposing voices be heard?
Mary Piccard Vance, a retired minister and volunteer animal caretaker at the Tallahassee Museum, told the Tallahassee Democrat that she disagrees that the new harvest would right the wrongs of the last one.
"Bear hunting in Florida became taboo for many years because of the atrocities that occurred then and the overwhelming objections that arose as a result," wrote Piccard Vance in her editorial, adding that the 2015 hunt included reports of pre-hunting season baiting and trailing of bears.
"There was little or no actual hunting on opening day, because the hunters knew exactly where and when to find their prey. In the Panhandle, the kill limit was 40 for the season. On the first day, 112 bears were killed, including two babies."
The decision not to implement check stations (some say, to avoid protest confrontations) would create a free-for-all situation for hunters and has come down on the FWC for "trophy hunting" favoritism and allowing dogs for baiting, professes Susan Hargreaves, a vocal activist and author, who commissioned an anti bear hunt billboard in Tallahassee, runs a wildlife protection nonprofit.
Proponent Davidson told the Daily Commercial that she thinks FWC employees will be conscientious in assessing if bears are killed illegally, but the FWC has not released details on how diligently they will enforce the hunt.
Mike Orlando, a bear management program coordinator and biologist with the FWC, had concluded his management plan update last year by saying that "no action was needed."
Back in December 2024, FWC Commissioner Gary Lester publicly requested that staff draft a proposal for a bear hunt.
"This directive was issued even though FWC’s own statewide bear population study is not expected to be completed until around 2030," Adam Sugalski of the advocacy group OneProtest pointed out.
"Advancing a bear hunt proposal without the benefit of current, science-based population data undermines responsible wildlife management and ignores the very precautionary principles FWC claims to uphold."
To Ward, hunting has its place, but it's not an issue of necessity.
"People are not hunting as the most cost-effective form to get protein. They can go out and buy meat or fish at Walmart and for a lot cheaper than they do when they buy the gun and the truck and the hunting permit and the UTV and the boat and the boat gas. Hunting and fishing are for sport, and they're for tradition ... I'm fine with that. That's a personal ethical decision.
"People eat meat. People don't eat meat. People are for hunting. People are against hunting. I understand and appreciate the motivations and perspective behind a lot of those choices, but this hunt is about sport."
Can hunting be a viable way to manage Florida's population, as proponents assert?
Ward's response: "I'm suspicious of those claims."
This article originally appeared on Daily Commercial: Bear hunt as management: Carlton Ward Jr. says he's 'suspicious of those claims'
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